Something is happening in the United States. The political landscape is being transformed, though just how widely, deeply or permanently is still unclear.

Bernie Sanders, the reforming senator from the New England state of Vermont, has captured the imagination of millions of people through his quest to secure the Democratic nomination for this year’s presidential election.

His domestic policy proposals are radically at odds with what is acceptable to the US ruling class: double the paltry federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, free university tuition, universal public health care, paid family leave and a $1 trillion jobs and infrastructure program – all paid for by raising taxes, primarily on the rich.

Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, one of the parasite investment banks at the centre of the financial crisis of 2008, said in January that the rise of Sanders “has the potential to be a dangerous moment”.

Yet the self-described socialist, who calls for a “political revolution” and denounces the greed of the “millionaire and billionaire class”, has generated an insurgency at the ballot box in the first voting states and has gained ground in national polls. In New Hampshire, he won every demographic except those over the age of 65 and those earning more than $200,000 per year. And, as US election analyst Harry Enten noted at the website fivethirtyeight.com, “He did far better with those with lower incomes”.

His campaign speeches often are huge crowd pullers. For example, an October appearance in Boston drew 25,000, smashing the previous Democratic primary speech record of 10,000, set by current president Barack Obama in 2008. He also has smashed records for campaign financing, attracting some 3.5 million contributions, averaging less than $30 each – a further indication that workers and the income poor are his main backers.

It seems improbable that he will defeat the machine of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, which has the backing of Wall Street, the big corporations, the wealthy and the Democratic Party establishment. But even if he ultimately fails, you get the sense that a genie has been let out of a bottle. The genie is not Sanders himself – in many ways he is a stock politician, with a number of very poor positions that would profoundly disappoint victims of US imperialism abroad, among others – but the sentiment that he has tapped.

US society is in a state of decay. The infrastructure is crumbling, real wages for workers are lower than they were in the 1970s, extreme poverty and malnourishment are evident in almost every city, legions of returned soldiers suffer post-traumatic stress, and basic health care is only a dream for tens of millions of people.

The economy, eight years after the financial meltdown, has experienced one of the weakest recoveries on record. For the working class, there has been no recovery – it has all gone to the rich. Millions of people have left the labour force because there just aren’t any jobs for them.

Disgust and disillusion surround the corrupt political processes at state and federal levels. There is an understanding that the economic transformation of the country, the last 35 years of neoliberalism and the post-crisis attacks on workers, were not inevitable, but a determined project of the rich and powerful for the benefit of the rich and powerful.

That Sanders has struck a chord in this context is an extremely important development. We are used to reading the patronising musings of establishment commentators and politicians who say that socialists are out of touch. They say that the left is just a bunch of inner-city elites – the comfortable middle classes who sneer at uneducated blue collar workers, who are divorced from “real life”, whose concerns are merely cultural.

Yet Sanders, who makes a disciplined argument about the scourge of economic inequality, has shown that class politics can win people when it speaks concretely to their concerns.

He has shown – in also speaking to the issues of racism and police violence against Blacks, bigotry and fear-mongering against Muslims and immigrants, equality for gays and lesbians, and women’s control over their bodies – that class politics need not be socially conservative, but can be explained in a way that convinces millions of working class people that we stand or fall together, that injustice against one group is a failure for us all.

He is also showing that concern for the situation and problems of oppressed groups need not be totally grounded in the politics of identity. This shouldn’t be overstated. The senator, at least in current polling, has not won a majority of Black Democrats to his cause. But he has won many, and more seem to be shifting his way as the campaign develops and his message becomes better known. On the other hand, Hillary Clinton, who has long campaigned on the platform that it would be good for all women if a woman became president, decisively lost the vote of young women in early voting to this 74-year-old white man, who understands that health, education and wages are central issues for all working class people, regardless of their gender.

Also telling is that there are signs that he may be winning over some Republicans, for whom terrorism and immigration are concerns, but who recognise that big business has too much power and that working people are being ripped off by an economy that, as Sanders repeatedly says, “is rigged” for the rich.

Anger with the economic and political system has found a left wing electoral expression, which is unlike anything seen in the US in generations. Whether it can be cohered into a movement to rebuild the left is another question.

But there definitely is hope that it might. Paul Street, a critic of Sanders and the author of They rule: the 1% v democracy, wrote after witnessing the mood during the Iowa caucuses: “Something left and radically democratic is up with young folks and others and it’s not going to disappear … Consider it an approaching left storm, bigger than the electoral major party Sanders sensation”.